I’m happy to announce that my new book Statue of Limitations is out now!
TL;DR:
This book is a collection of 30 stories, flash fiction, and other fragments and zine articles and stuff. It’s similar in theme to my 2019 book Ranch: The Musical, and a bit more lightweight than last year’s Decision Paralysis. I’m happy I was able to get this one in right under the wire in the last few hours of 2025, so I can clear the deck and start working on something new.
I spent most of 2025 trying to land a sequel to Atmospheres and got pretty close, but life sort of fell apart for a minute back in September, and I probably lost a good month there. I can’t remember when I wrote down this title, but I started throwing various zine articles that were never published, dream journals, listicles, and parts of stories into a draft towards the end of October, with a goal of getting a 20,000-word quickie done in 2025.
This is the third time I’ve done this, and it’s sort of akin to the Agile development process. Ship early, ship often; I do these much more lightweight books that are cheap and can be written fast, read fast, published fast. I hate to use the term “punk rock” to describe anything, but the idea here is that instead of spending years chipping away at an 800-page tome that eventually nobody will read, I’d rather push out these quick DIY dispatches and keep the river flowing. Maybe they aren’t perfect; maybe they’re filled with typos or dead ends. But the goal is to keep them going and constantly improve, get the next one slightly better than the last.
On October 19 (my anniversary), I had a new project with 14 documents, 11,000 words and a potential title but no story for it. I think by Thanksgiving, I’d broken 25,000 words, and it got up to 30K shortly after that. The word count is deceptive, because maximalist writers like David Foster Wallace will have sentences that long, but this writing is so dense and concentrated, a 500-word story can have a ton of work in it.
I took two weeks off in December, and hoped I could catch up a bit. November was rough because of the death of Loca, but I kept at it, chipping away. My hope dwindled on getting it done by the 31st, but I trudged on, thinking at least I could wrap it up by the end of January. I got almost no work done on the trip to Wisconsin and Indiana, and when I got back, I opened the manuscript and just stared at it, thinking it would take me a week or two to get moving from a dead stop.
I don’t know what happened, but I woke up at five in the morning on the 31st and thought, “I have to finish this today.” I spent the next twelve hours at full combat speed, rushing through each piece, writing what needed to be finished, junking a couple of stories and rounding as many corners as possible. I had to do the Kindle layout, which required a Scrivener upgrade that I thought for sure was going to doom me. I decided to defer the print version and my usual “long last look” pass just to get the Kindle draft out, knowing I could do another editing pass and get the wraparound cover and print layout done on the first. At 0500 I didn’t even have the titular story started. By dinner time, the book was submitted.
Another quick announcement I’ll get into later: this is the first book on a new imprint called Rumored Books. I’ll use it going forward for my stuff. I don’t know what else I will do with it or how I’ll market it. You’re looking at the URL for it (rumored.com) although I’ve got rumoredbooks.com registered and it’s pointed here for now. Maybe I will spin up a fancy site nobody will read for the imprint. Maybe it will become a different blog. Maybe I will publish other stuff. More on this later I guess.
What I do know is I have to keep going. This is my 19th book, and I have at least two dozen ideas, half-done manuscripts, and other things up on blocks right now, so I have to keep the river flowing. Stay tuned.